TAIPEI – Etron Technoogy Inc. has started work on buffered DRAM designs geared for 3-D ICs using through-hole vias. The company is also working on an upgrade of a low-cost gesture recognition module. Chip stacking technology has the potential to disrupt business models and traditional systems design, said Nicky Lu, the company’s founder and chief [...]

The Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium (HMCC) — the 3D DRAM effort led by Micron Technology Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. — said that software giant Microsoft Corp. has joined the group. Last October, memory rivals Samsung and Micron announced the creation of a consortium to develop an open interface specification for a 3D memory technology called [...]

Executives said a variety of 3-D ICs will hit the market in 2014 despite numerous challenges, and CMOS scaling is slowing down but still viable through a 7 nm node. via Chip execs see 20 nm variants, 3-D ICs ahead.

Amid the industry’s insatiable thirst for more bandwidth, Cisco Systems Inc. said that it wants 2.5D/3D stacked devices sooner than later and is getting “impatient” regarding the overall progress of the technology. Only a smattering of 2.5D/3D chips have been announced and shipped in the market today. Despite the hype for the technology in recent [...]

According to the article, these chips could replace flash memory in thumb drives, smart phones and computers. The transparency also makes it perfect for touchscreen displays, and such futuristic concepts as smart glass for windshields that could then have functionality built into something that previously just served the purpose of optics. via Transparent, Flexible, Scalable [...]

The IC industry must embrace — and become more active — in the standards process to help jumpstart the 2.5D/3D chip era, according to a panel at the recent Mentor Graphics User Group Meeting in Santa Clara, Calif. One of the members of the panel also challenged conventional wisdom, saying that 2.5D devices based on interposers could be more [...]

…3D-ICs are “almost getting mainstream” and are moving along the adoption curve….many types of 2.5D and 3D-ICs that are already in design or production by memory, foundry, CPU/GPU, FPGA, and mobile providers. Qualcomm is investigating stacked dies including memory and logic. Why? As 2D scaling gets more expensive, 3D “seems like a very good opportunity.” [...]

The “Euro cloud” program is a 3D server on chip concept to integrate ARM processor cores with 3D DRAM for very dense, low power data centers for mobile cloud services for hand held devices. The goal of this european commission funded project is to support hundreds cores in a single server and show the path [...]

Interposer supply/ecosystem examined at IMAPS Device Packaging – ElectroIQ. 2.5 D interposers are an important part of the 3D IC evolution path. While TSMC prefers to keep interposers and assembly in-house, other foundries are looking to outsourced assembly and test groups, allowing mixing and matching of die, to handle their packaging. Why is this important? [...]